Heart Day

This week started with Valentine's Day. I had an eventful day, we basically spent a good portion of it in the doctor's office. But, when we got home, Keke and J had a late dinner planned on our balcony. They decorated the balcony with lights, a table, and some chairs. They made dinner for us, served us and gave us wonderful cards for Valentine's Day. I fail to mention that it was freezing outside and we ate dinner in our winter coats, hats, and long johns. But it was nice for them to think about us. We ended our dinner with a cup of coffee and a sit by the heater (to defrost). I have a few pics of what we have been doing this week.

We played a silly sentence game. I found it here.. I printed and laminated the cards and put them into piles. We chose a card from each pile and made up silly sentences. This one was "A green booger monster met a skunk in a hot air balloon while riding a magic carpet." They were silly and we had fun making them up. We laughed at them and sometimes added things.

We are still working on recognition of the alphabet and hand/eye coordination. She is connecting the letters in order.

We are comparing numbers here. This is the last week of our pond unit and I found these fish erasers. She chose 2 numbers to compare, put the fish under the number and then decided which one was greater. This aids in one to one correspondence and visual discrimination.

We finished our pond mural!!! yay! We added our two adult turtles and a baby turtle. I think it turned out pretty cute and we had fun learning about the animals that live in the pond. Now, we are off to visit the zoo! We will begin our zoo unit next week. As an added bonus, we bought a video here and inside, there was a coupon for a free visit to the zoo. So, I am hoping we will make a zoo visit sometime soon.

We have been watching old episodes of Jeff Corwin lately. We have season one and two of his show. I had bought them awhile ago and we had never watched them all. So, now at lunch, we watch an episode while we eat. J has been learning alot about animals. We were playing like we were naturalists trying to capture snakes and here baby Kaleb has captured two! He is wrestling them to the ground....

But, he has decided to eat him instead. Yum, he tastes pretty good, good thing he wasn't venomous.

One last photo,,,sorry about the red eye. I didn't have time to fix the photo. Again, this cute, smiling baby photo was taken by my talented daughter, Keke. She can always get him to smile. You can just see his two dimples that show when he is truly smiling (and alittle drool).

No Internet....again

It has been awhile since I have posted due to a lack of Internet....again. But I think that we finally got it fixed and I am ready to roll again. It has been about two weeks without the connection but it felt like a month. The last week of January, I taught English at a T elementary school. That was an experience in itself. The kids had a two week winter break and there was a winter English camp that needed teachers. I figured it was only temporary but I tell you, it was a long week. We are back to school this week and I am happy to be home with the kids again. This is what we have been doing so far...

I is for inch worm...I found this game on the Internet. It is reinforcing number recognition. She counts the holes in the leaves and matches the inch worm with the correct number to the leaf. I printed this off and laminated it so we can use it again.

We classified animals. She separated animals into categories - what lives in the ocean, on the farm, and in the zoo. We are finishing up our pond unit and will be moving on to the zoo.

Here it is finished. Not sure where I found it but I definitely found it on the Internet.

We read Inch by Inch written by Leo Lionni. We then measured items with an "inch" ruler. This book was cute and it introduced measurement to J. She had fun measuring things...

Here she is measuring Kaleb. He doesn't seem to mind though.

He loves her. She can do just about anything and he smiles or laughs at her.

Measuring the chair...

 Measuring our Chicka tree. Uh..she dressed herself today, in case you were wondering. She calls her ballerina skirt-her princess skirt. I had to fight with her to put on her tights since it is still kinda cold here and I am fighting a cold (due to my week with the T kids). She informed me that princesses don't wear tights but I promptly informed her that this princess does and unless she put them on, she was going to lose her princess skirt. She put them on, as you can see.

I is for Iguana. We made an iguana pocket and colored I word cards to put in it. This idea came from here. This website has so many things to do. I can usually find plenty to do there.

What did Kaleb learn this week? Well, he ate his first carrots...needless to say, he enjoyed them on his fist and shirt more than on the spoon.

He started his exercising in his Johnny Jump Up. I think he likes the freedom he has to move around and around. He hasn't got the hang of jumping yet, but he will. He has been kicking his legs more so it is only a matter of time.

This is his four month old picture that Keke took for me. Keke is the family photographer and she seems to get the good family pictures .

One last cute picture....I couldn't resist. Again, Keke prevailed. J has been asking for a baby sister...haha. She said she would like a baby brother, which she already has, and a baby sister. She loves Kaleb tremendously and is a big help. He loves her as well.

Week H

This is a picture of our pond mural. We have ducks, frogs, fish, and cattails. This week we will add some dragonflies that we created and lily pads. It is starting to look like a pond. We have a couple more weeks to add some turtles, snakes, and possibly an alligator.

We worked on our alphabet this week. It was H week. J is putting together a puzzle of the alphabet. I am constantly amazed at how she is recognizing letters everywhere, even ones that we haven't worked on.

H is for...brown? Nah, J just seems to focus on one color when she is coloring. I am always reminding her to change colors. Today we had to throw away her beloved pink marker. That was her favorite and she hated to throw it away but it no longer worked. Now, she is forced to pick other colors since pink is unavailable.

H is for heart. We made a Valentine's rug for the door. These rugs are relatively cheap at IKEA, less than 4 TL. I needed a new one for the bathroom, so I washed the old one and we painted it. We stamped flowers and hearts on it. I think it turned out cute. The paint I used isn't permanent fabric paint so I don't imagine it will last long but it should last long enough for Valentine's Day. Maybe I will just wash it, see if it comes out, and we will paint it again for another holiday.

We have been practicing writing our letters so I made a book to practice our numbers. Each number has a cute saying to help her write the number. I laminated them to make them reusable. Here is where you can find the printable number book.

J is doing a alphabet dot to dot. This will help with hand eye coordination as well as recognition of her letters.

We are working on recognizing patterns. What comes next? This is a Valentine's pattern activity that I printed out to use for the next month. She has to determine what comes next. This is a new concept so we will be working on it for awhile using different items. The patterns get harder as you go. Right now we are working on ABAB patterns as well ABBABB patterns. You can find the Valentine's printables here.

Here is one of our dragonflies that we made for our pond. We colored coffee filters with markers, sprayed them with water to blend the colors, and waited for them to dry. We then glued them to popsicle sticks and added eyes.

Here is my smiling Kaleb. He joined us for school today.

Our Week

We finally have Internet...yay! It has been one week without Internet and you don't really know how much you use it until you lose it. This has been our week...

G is for giraffe, we made a giraffe growth chart and put it up on the wall to measure how tall J is. The funny thing about this was about 3 days after we hung it up, J asked me to measure her again to see if she grew alot more!

I made some homemade finger paints and J finger painted fish for our pond. The pond finally is looking like a pond.

I found this dry erasable mat at Target and here J is practicing writing her alphabet. I am now seeing her write more and more letters when she draws her pictures. It is pretty neat to see that.

Here we are playing a froggy game using plastic frogs as markers. I laminated this game sheet and on the back (always trying to have a 2 for 1 deal because I don't want to waste laminating materials) there is a dog game. Since it is laminated, I can write letters or math problems and we can play this over and over again. This fits with our pond unit.

We are working on shapes and patterns. J is using her pattern blocks to make the shape of a dragonfly.

I found these great printable scissor skill worksheets. These will help J learn to cut with her scissors. She has to follow and cut on the lines. We will be doing this more often to help build up her hand muscles.

This is a handwriting practice sheet. By doing these, J will be able to write her letters smoothly. I didn't laminate this one, instead I placed the sheet into a page protector and gave J a dry erase marker. The page protector allows the marker to erase and you will be able to reuse the worksheet. I found these here.

Here J is painting her family. I just love the long legs!

Keke has been learning how to make balloon animals and face painting. Don't sit still here at my house or she will paint your face! She wants to practice because she has joined a high school group who will be doing balloon animals and face painting for different functions. In fact, next week she will be face painting refugee children here in the city to bring alittle fun for them. She is looking forward to it and she is getting very good. You should see her detailed face painting. The mustache was J's idea.

This week, Kaleb got a new high chair and is learning how to eat from a spoon. This was only his second time but he seems to be getting the hang of it. The high chair was pricey but I know he will get some good use out of it. And J loves it because he become her audience with no where for him to go. He is at her mercy at whatever she wants to play. Yesterday, she brought out the hand puppets and started a little show. He doesn't mind though, he loves her and is always smiling at her.

This week, we will be working on the letter H, our pond unit, finishing up our mitten unit. Keke will be taking mid term exams and Kaleb will be working with the spoon. Hopefully, we will have Internet all week but we are getting around to changing our Internet and phone accounts which may mean no Internet until they decided to hook it up. Smile:)

F is for Fire (no...really)

This is just going to be a quick post with no pictures. Today, while making dinner, my doorbell rang. Now, ordinarily, unless I need something from the store, I don't answer. Well, I didn't answer, then about 10 minutes later, it rings again. This time I go to the door thinking that it is my DH coming home from work. Not so. There was alot of commotion in the hallway. People running up and down the stairs with buckets of water. And then I heard the T word for fire and I saw the smoke. There was a fire on our roof caused from the roof repairs and who knows? Maybe the man with the flame thrower who was melting the tar paper on there today. I proceeded to yell upstairs at Keke to get out of bed (she came home sick today) and start running around trying to turn off the stove and lights. We get J's boots and jacket on and I pick up the baby from the crib. We give the men what water we had, not sure it helped though, and we leave. As we end up downstairs, a family from the school (who had called during this commotion and informed me my roof was on fire) met us at the elevator and took us to their house. Their house just happens to be in the other building, opposite from ours, and we were able to watch the fire fighters come to put out the all-most-extinguished fire. It was after I left that I thought of a million things I should have taken - like the passports and birth certificates but I ultimately got the items that mean the most to me - my children. That was all I was thinking about, getting them out safely. After, about one hour or so, the fire fighters left and we were able to go back into our apartment. I was concerned I would see water in the apartment but the only problem it looks like we are going to have is in the upstairs bathroom. It seems the foam/water has leaked onto the ceiling. I hope it dries and won't get moldy. We have a problem with that here and the new roof was supposed to fix that. What can I say-life is an adventure here, never a dull moment. The ironic thing about this is that we are working on the letter F and I had planned on discussing fire safety with J. Now, we had experienced it first hand. Won't that be a memorable lesson?

And Finally Some School....

We are finally getting back to doing "school" after the holidays and the sickness. This is what we have done so far.

We are working on the letter F. So, here J is cutting pink hearts for a pink Flamingo that we are making.

J is stamping the letter F for her alphabet book. She is stamping little fish and frogs on it.

F is for family. I made these family handwriting practice cards for J. I used a worksheet that had the lines, added our family member names, and a picture. Then, I laminated them using my handy dandy laminator that my Parents bought me for Christmas. I love that thing. Because the cards are laminated, J can practice writing all of the names over and over again, then just erase. She worked through the whole family (including Sammy-our  Grandpa's dog), tracing all of the letters then erasing.

Here is a closer view of the Family cards that I made.

We are still working on our Mitten unit and what is cold weather without hot chocolate? This is a number game that I printed off (and laminated :) I am in laminator heaven - ha ha). J would pick a number and add "marshmallows" to the mug of hot chocolate. Now, you are supposed to use real ones but since the real marshmallows didn't survive the holidays (you can't get them here), we used pompoms. Because I am trying to be thrifty with my laminating sleeves, since I won't be able to get any more until I return to America, we can flip this number game over and play Winter Tic Tac Toe.

J likes this game. The game pieces are mice and hats for our Mitten Unit. She is learning how to block three in a row and how to win. I also laminated the smaller game pieces and cut them out to be able to reuse them later.

And we finally added some ducks to our pond. I have had this pond hanging up in my stairway since the beginning of December, long enough for a T friend to ask if it was an abstract piece of art! It is just green poster board and blue plastic wrap. I am happy now to have added paper plate ducks that J painted yellow. We are hoping for some finger painted fish (still on the letter f) and a green frog to be added later this week to keep our lonely ducks company.

And lastly, still learning about the pond, we made a pond using a plastic container. J had some fish, turtles, lizards, and frogs that she added to the water. And I made some lily pads from green foam sheets. I was going to add some blue food coloring to the water for a real water effect but since she is wearing her favorite outfit (white flower shirt and pink tutu - thanks gramma), I decided not to. The reason - J informed me that I haven't been doing a good job with the laundry. She put her princess undershirt on the other day and found a stain on it. It is her favorite undershirt. It was, of course, my fault that the stain was there and not the fact that she was eating in her undershirt and dropped some kind of food on it! ha ha I love having a four year old teenager!